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The State Of ReactOS

11-12-2013, 11:50 AM

Phoronix: The State Of ReactOS

ReactOS, the open-source experimental operating system that aims for binary compatibility with software and drivers for Microsoft Windows, is still under heavy development since the project began in the late 90's. One of the long-time developers along the way with ReactOS has been Alex Ionescu and he's shared a status update and demo of the operating system...

Interesting project. Unfortunately, no chance of ever working as good as Windows. Not enough manpower.

For one time I agree with you. With more support from developers and maybe companies this could be a really big thing. But I guess if they ever get to a state that they actually are a competition for Windows Microsoft will use their whole legal department to find everything they can sue them over.

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For one time I agree with you. With more support from developers and maybe companies this could be a really big thing. But I guess if they ever get to a state that they actually are a competition for Windows Microsoft will use their whole legal department to find everything they can sue them over.

They can't. The legal rational for ReactOS is the same as the one for WINE. ReactOS nearly died because one developer was found to have not clean-room-reverse-engineered one block of code, and they had to audit EVERYTHING for compliance as a result. Nice to see them kicking off again though.

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It's not wrong to use a Windows-like OS that's developed slower than Windows, given that it won't adapt "tiles" so soon...

Sure, of course! BUT what is the point of a Windows compatible OS that is capable to run mostly Windows XP software and drivers? Their Application database doesn't look promising at all. I just doubt ReactOS can find users in forseeable future even if there were a stable release ... :-/
ReactOS is only superior to wine when it comes to drivers BUT drivers under Linux is no issue at all nowadays. U know what i mean?

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They can't. The legal rational for ReactOS is the same as the one for WINE.

This is brought up in this talk, and the speaker (Ionescu) mentions that he has no idea of whether or not ReactOS is implementing Microsoft patented functionality as he (and other developers I presume) refuse to look at Microsoft patents since if they would be sued they would be subject to increased damages should they have been aware of the patents in question.

I do think that if Microsoft would like to shut down ReactOS they would easily find some broad bogus patent through which they could litigate, and obviously ReactOS would have no money to go to court so they would have to yield.

On the other hand, ReactOS is nowhere near being a threat to Microsoft Windows so the devs likely aren't particularly worried.

ReactOS nearly died because one developer was found to have not clean-room-reverse-engineered one block of code, and they had to audit EVERYTHING for compliance as a result.

While I don't think ReactOS was actually close to dying during the clean room debacle, I recall that several old-timer developers jumped ship at that time (don't know if they have returned since then), the developer who added the non-clean room code was actually Alex Ionescu, the guy doing the youtube talk here, so has obviously been 'forgiven'.

Which is a good think as he is an authority on the NT kernel (and windows subsystems in general) and also proficient as a developer.

Overall ReactOS is a great project which suffers from the same thing that Haiku OS does, which is a desperate lack of developers.

One benefit of ReactOS versus Haiku though is that once ReactOS compability is greatly improved, users will have access to the huge amount of available Windows software, meanwhile Haiku OS will still be plagued by the severe lack of software.

That said, given the extremely small resources available to these projects, the amount of funtionality they've been able to achieve is nothing short of amazing.